Cleaning Up Your Back End #blogathon2

I am hosting a mini challenge for the biannual Blogathon. There is still time to join in!

I know the title sounds super dirty, but back end work no matter where it is, usually is something no one wants to do. It is usually tedious, time consuming and necessary.

There are so many things you need to do to make sure the back of your blog is optimized for SEO, but we will start with one of the basics that many neglect.

Categories

Categories are something that we all use with every post, or we should be. The Category is how you categorize your blog. Most of my categories can be found up in the menu bar. These should be fewer than your tags. Now to the housecleaning part. Did you know that to optimize these categories (and subsequently your blog) for SEO, you need to add descriptions. You can do that by going to http://yourblogname.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category or by selecting “categories” under the post drop down. Once you are on this page you will see a list of all your categories.

As you can see, I am lacking a description under blogging tips. You just check off the box, then select edit. This will take you to an edit category screen where you need to fill out the description for your category. When you describe the category, make sure you use the words that the category is about and a few synonyms for Google Search. It can be simple and should be made into a sentence. A trick I use is to type my category in Google search and check what auto-populates.

Your challenge is to add descriptions to all of your categories. While you are there you should also delete the ones that don’t make any sense, have no posts, or are not relevant to your blog.

Oh WOW! I had no idea that WordPress’ categories had their own meaning in meta data, let alone that they were covered through the category descriptions. Too cool, and now fixed! Thanks for the heads up! 🙂

Thanks for the reminder and how cleaning up and adding descriptions to category and tags is helpful. I had no idea. I had more clean-up than I originally thought, lots of tags! But it’s done and onto the next goal.

Thank you for this post Jennifer! My back end is a mess and I SO needed this post!

I was planning on working on my Categories and Navbar this weekend but the information on the Description category is new to me. Now that I know what it is for, I will be tackling this all in one fell swoop!

Have a great weekend. I am heading over to get started on this right now!

Thanks for hosting this mini challenge. This is one that I will be avidly participating in. I am getting ready to make a blog move in February and my categories need some major housecleaning. As I just added SEO to my blog a couple of months ago to start with I have not added anything to my categories only recent posts. Thank you for the tip and the how-to.